ALG Calls Upon MSNBC to Fire All Involved in Fraudulent 8/18/09 Broadcast

August 20th, 2009, Fairfax, VA—Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson today in a letter called upon MSNBC Executive Producer Steven Capus to fire all involved with producing a misleading broadcast that Wilson termed a “nefarious assault on decency.”

According to the Wilson letter to Capus, in the MSNBC broadcast at 10:45AM on August 18th “your anchors hysterically raised the specter of impending racial violence — while carefully cropping the very video upon which they based their duplicitous charges. Leading audiences nationwide to believe that militant whites were mounting violence against a black President, they deliberately covered up the fact that the individual they were framing was himself African-American.”

The broadcast showed a video of a man with a machine gun at a protest against the government-run health care legislation in Arizona, a state where citizens are permitted to carry firearms openly.

“His face and hands were cropped out so that viewers could not see that the man was black as the broadcasters breathlessly reported that he was a rightwing white militant,” Wilson explained in a statement.

“This simply goes beyond the pale, and has never in my memory been seen in what is supposed to be a legitimate news broadcast,” Wilson said.

Wilson said that the three broadcasters on the air, Contessa Brewer, Dylan Ratigan, and Toure must be fired. “It’s not a question of if they should be fired, it’s a question of how quickly they are canned,” said adding, “The American people need responsible journalism to reach informed decisions, not cropped videos to create the imagery of racial tension.”

In his letter, Wilson wrote that the broadcast “purposely fanned racial tensions” and “endangered the life of the President of the United States.”

Wilson said that the action was “deliberate,” and that if Capus did not act immediately, “MSNBC would permanently be stained as nothing more than a propaganda machine for the hard left.”

Interview Availability:Please contact Alex Rosenwald at (703)383-0880 or at arosenwald@getliberty.org to arrange an interview with ALG President Bill Wilson.